Film Name:热辣滚烫/YOLO,You Only Live Once
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The name of the film, 《YOLO》, may be a reference to life, or life, or the attitude of living. The feeling of being hit hard by life is hot, hot, hot, a kind of pain, but to live freely and wantonly, to turn life into what you want, to live in such a distinct way, is called hot hot hot hot.
The whole film tells a story about a person who lost his goal and motivation to fight, lost himself, and shrunk all over the place, and after losing a lot of it made changes and found himself again.
From the very beginning of the film, when we see the 200kg Le Ying, we understand very well that she is unconfident, bereft, breathless in her speech, a person who has stayed at home for 10 years, in a closed state. Her friendships, family, and love are in shambles, and potential new relationships that might have happened, new fulcrums of strength, have been eliminated by the show’s malicious editing. One by one, a person’s spiritual fulcrums were destroyed, so she jumped. But she didn’t die. And then she chose to change.
Change is difficult, and in the case of Le Ying’s dramatic before and after changes, it is even more difficult. Whether a person with atrophied leg muscles can still get up and run and live a hot and steamy life is a big question mark on the road of life. In the run-up to the film I had reservations about the pivot point that sustained Lok Ying in making the change – how great human inertia is, let alone for 10 years – and then I saw a series of conflicts laid out. 10 years ago Lok Ying chose to withdraw from society, stayed at home, and retreated into her comfort zone, and 10 years later her home is no longer her comfort zone, and she’s found a new one, which is the coach she’s living with. That is, the rented room where she lives with her coach, but soon that comfort zone is gone as well. I can understand why she had that fight with the coach – she said isn’t boxing your dream, you should stick to it – because the coach’s dream was no longer just the coach’s dream at that point. In the early part of the film, Le Ying’s ego is always shrinking, hidden, like a silent shadow, until this line. The coach is portrayed as okay, but if Le Ying was still just thinking of others at that time, she should have echoed or comforted the coach, but her first reaction was to raise objections. There was a light in people who were serious about chasing their dreams and living their lives, and that was a very different side of her from back then, and it wasn’t just because of giving both apples out that she went along with and took care of it like a moth to a flame. It was also the result of her fervent hopes and expectations. She put a part of herself in the coach. And of course we all know the result, a mess. Then she went back on the show because she was touched by her cousin, and it turned out to be another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another. It’s like the conversation she had with her dad where someone asked her for an apple and she would give it all. For not loving herself, for not being worthy, for everyone else being more precious than herself. She doesn’t post to her friends because her life is nothing to show, nothing to remember, and nothing to hold on to. She wants to be happy, she wants to maintain even a good relationship, so she always gives it out in fear, all of it, and she puts up with whatever hurts her. She pulls out her apple again and again, tries so hard to give, only to have it crushed on the ground again and again, like the lights in the camera that come on one by one, shine briefly through her heart and then go out one after another.
When your life is a complete mess, when you feel like you can’t take it anymore, when all you have left is yourself, you can only embrace yourself, and if you choose to embrace yourself, you’ll see how powerful the ego can be. Boxing became something she really wanted to do, it became her dream. She went from 200 pounds to 100 pounds, to getting in the ring, to getting hit all the time, to managing to fight back once, it was a long process, and it’s hard to imagine the amount of ego struggles she went through, life’s fists swinging, 10,000,000 times down, 10,000,000 times up, and it’s been obsessive.
In the end the race she hadn’t won. But she has won in a sense, because she overcame the self, she broke free of the original shackles, she has an account of the past self, she found a new fulcrum for the future self. Will Le Ying’s life be better after this? Who knows? Maybe it will still be bad, maybe there will be all kinds of accidents, but she will live a good life. When a person has such control over his body, he also builds a relatively stable psychological order, like a solid foundation on which more colourful cubes can be built.
The story is a cheesy one, except for a little bit of magic in the front with slightly too much blood, and the unfolding in the back is still very real, especially the ending of the race. I think people who have really struggled with themselves in real life will be more or less touched by this film, even though the heroine’s training scenes don’t take up much time (and the audience might get bored if they do).
We may all have had a dream, or a standard/paradigm, or just a thought, about what life should be like, about what kind of person I want to be, what kind of life I want to live. But in the erosion of time, trivia, and accumulated habits, this original pursuit may be extinguished, like a candle flame in a storm. Our ego may also be like a ghost, flickering and looming at some point. After watching the film, may you be able to regain the original heart and move forward.
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